Issue 56 March 2016
The Frisina Group, LLC
INFLUENTIAL LEADER The Need to Provide Hope
Issue 56 MAR 2016 IN THIS ISSUE The Need to Provide Hope 1 Shift in Leadership Thinking 2
Influential Leader is a publication of The Frisina Group, LLC.
I was in an airport on business travel. As is often the case, the airport gives me a wonderful opportunity to observe human behavior. The stress and frantic pace at which we move in airports creates the perfect laboratory to observe how people interact with one another. Leading an organization dedicated to the education and study of behavior based performance, observing and interacting with others when given the opportunity, like an airport setting, is a readymade learning laboratory. On this recent trip I noticed a t-shirt an individual was wearing. The verbiage read “Hope is a not Strategy.” I believe the individual wearing the shirt recognized the political irony of the wording. It triggered my thinking back to
leadership and leader behavior. Hope is certainly not a “strategy” because people are not managed or strategized. People are lead, and hope is an essential and legitimate need for people that leaders must manage with great care. Effective influential leaders are dealers in hope. Regardless of the chaos and challenges in most workplace settings today, effective leaders seek to inspire others and cultivate hope in their daily practice of leadership. As we wrote in our January newsletter, cultivating trust, compassion, security, and hope into organizational culture is a daily requirement for all leaders. Old behaviors can be accomplished in an auto-pilot mode with little impact on productivity and performance. New behaviors require a concerted and concentrated effort and focus.
The Frisina Group, LLC (Continued) Hope plays a critical role in leaders’ ability to motivate others because hope is oriented towards the future. Leaders who have a positive mind-set about the future and who promote enthusiasm among followers instill hope. Hope, in turn, encourages others to imagine themselves in more ideal situations or to motivate them to achieve a better outcome for themselves, their job assignments, and their organization’s objectives. Employees do not want to work for leaders who cannot rally them to look beyond their current difficulties and challenges. Leaders who fail to recognize the emotional element of hope, reinforced by neurochemical stimulation in the brain, risk losing critical performance leverage in people achieving their operational objectives. Loss of hope or no hope is a critical ingredient in a failed recipe for performance outcomes. Ray Johnston, in his book The Hope Quotient, identifies four critical outcomes of providing hope. He states that hope liberates, motivates, initiates and activates. Providing hope liberates others in that they are not held back by past poor performance, or mistakes. Likewise it motivates them to achieve more. A motivated workforce is inspired to come to work everyday with the initiative to overcome whatever obstacles may be in their way. Finally, liberated, motivated, and taking initiative, your team is activated to achieve its highest level of performance. It all begins by instilling hope in those with whom
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Issue 56 March 2016 you work and lead. The reverse of instilling hope is provoking discouragement. Why would a leader intentionally seek to discourage people and teams from achieving their absolute best? How could the negative behavior of leaders and its impact on the hope factor for people be ignored with its direct relationship to performance? Consequently, as a leader competency, the ability to inspire hope should be a requirement for all leaders. A large number of people want to perform well in their work, so they expect their leaders to guide the way to that performance level. As a leader, you have the ability everyday to liberate, motivate, initiate and activate your team members to reach higher levels of performance. Indeed, hope is not a strategy; it is a legitimate human need. When leaders fulfill that need they help their people achieve the higher levels of organizational performance we all desire.
Notes
Hope is certainly not a “strategy” because people are not managed or strategized. People are lead, and hope is an essential and legitimate need for people that leaders must manage with great care.
Shift in Leadership Thinking Highly successful people are protective of the behavior they believe is the source of their success. This protectiveness is supported by confirmation biases. Confirmation bias is a type of selective thinking or a tendency to gravitate towards facts and data that suggest what an individual already believes to be true. With clients of the Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership, we experience many who leaders do not see their negative behaviors as the root cause of the safety, quality and service problems they encounter in the workplace. Their confirmation bias
A large number of people want to perform well in their work, so they expect their leaders to guide the way to that performance level.
The Frisina Group, LLC
Issue 56 March 2016
(continued) is strong, and they are often ready to show evidence from the data that something else is the source of their performance challenges. One conclusion is absolutely true: Behavior lapses are obvious to everyone but the person who commits them. Influential leadership, the belief that a leader’s behavior is the key predictor to organizational performance is a radical shift in leadership thinking. To develop a performance driven culture we advocate becoming compulsive about behavior as a performance leverage to drive your technical skill sets to the highest levels. Doing so gives you a competitive advantage to driving results in safety, quality and service indicators. This shift must start with leaders at all levels. Real change will never come from an annual conference or the latest management fad. It will come from within an organization whose leaders are committed to understanding the impact that being self-aware, collaborative and connected to their followers has on performance and the willingness to enhance their behavior competencies to unleash world class performance. People tend to change their behavior when they understand how it affects (negatively and positively) the outcome of their work, the lives of those around them and the overall performance of their organization. We call this dynamic the “value proposition” also known as “what’s in it for me?” For example, when a nurse supervisor who is verbally aggressive to care team members understands that this behavior intimidates co-workers and compromises their patient’s health, they are more likely to change or tone down their approach. Another example is when the pharmacy director changes the “mental map” or “mental script” of weary pharmacists by asking them to think of their job as enhancing the patient’s quality of life and not merely as just filling prescriptions
they too are more likely to pay closer attention to their work. The former thought process trumps the latter because it supports the fact that pharmacists play an active role in patient care and as such should display behaviors of their position to enhance safety and quality. Closing the performance gap in today’s market is a nonnegotiable imperative. In the middle of this gap between where we are currently performing and where we can realistically improve performance our businesses are suffering real and avoidable harm. Decades of emphasis on technical skills and technical solutions have provided some modicum of marginal improvement. The real key to improving performance and reducing the financial impact of a system fraught with errors and mistakes is to focus on behavioral skill development under the inspired and focused guidance of influential leaders.
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Issue 56 March 2016
The Frisina Group, LLC
Michael E. Frisina, PhD, is CEO of The Frisina Group, LLC, Founder and Senior Research Scholar at The Center for Influential Leadership. An award winning educator, author of three books including Influential Leadership – Change Yourself, Change Your Organization, Change Health Care (Health Administration Press/ACHE), and conference speaker, he is committed to improving the performance of your leaders, your people, and your organization. Michael is a former faculty member of The United States Military Academy at West Point and retired from The United States Army Medical Department. Dr. Frisina served as a subject matter expert in leadership and ethics for the United States Army Surgeon General and the Department of Defense Human Genome Project. Dr. Frisina served in a variety of leadership positions in several healthcare systems prior to founding his own organization. He received the American College of Health Care Executives 2012 and 2014 Educational Development Award. Michael can be contacted at
[email protected]
Influential Leader is a publication of The Frisina Group, LLC, and The Center for Influential Leadership. All Rights Reserved.
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Written to help leaders understand the link between behavior and peak performance, Influential Leadership reveals how successful and effective leaders are driven by a set of behaviors that enables them to become role models for followers, guide operational improvements, and sustain excellence.
“Dr. Frisina leverages a lifetime of observations and hard-earned wisdom to give us a handful of guiding principles to make us all better leaders in our professional and personal lives.” -Dr William R. Berry, MD, MPH, FACS, research associate, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health